Vic Fangio remade Eagles’ defense, seeks elusive Super Bowl title

• February 6, 2025

By JOSH DUBOW AP Pro Football Writer

NEW ORLEANS — Vic Fangio’s coaching career started in the 1970s as a high school assistant in Pennsylvania and has taken him across the country in various stops as he grew into one of the most innovative defensive coaches in the game.

Now at age 66, Fangio is at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, where he started his NFL coaching career, as defensive coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles team he grew up supporting with a chance to fill one of the few remaining gaps on a stellar career.

“I grew up a Philadelphia sports fan,” Fangio said. “Phillies, Eagles, Sixers, started my pro career in Philadelphia with the USFL. And now I’ll probably end it here one of these years. It’s kind of come full circle. … I kind of fit there.”

Fangio has incorporated eight new starters into a defense that ranked near the bottom of the NFL in 2023 and turned it into one of the league’s best as the Eagles led the NFL in advanced efficiency metrics and allowed the second-fewest points in the league.

He is a major reason why the Eagles are in the Super Bowl, giving Fangio the success he couldn’t achieve in a failed head coaching stint in Denver and a chance to win his first Super Bowl in 38 seasons in the NFL.

“I still really like to do it. I think I’m still halfway decent at it,” he said. “It’s great. If you hang around long enough the tide will turn.”

Fangio began his NFL career coaching one of the top linebacking groups ever for New Orleans’ “Dome Patrol” teams in 1986 and got his first chance as defensive coordinator for expansion Carolina in 1995.

He has spent nearly all of his time since in the NFL, with a one-year break to go to Stanford, and his defensive style that disguises coverages and tries to keep two safeties as deep as possible to limit big plays has been mimicked throughout the league.

His only previous trip to the Super Bowl came in the 2012 season with the San Francisco 49ers, when he lost to the Baltimore Ravens here at the Superdome.

“When you talk about coaches, sometimes you’re like ‘He’s been a good coach for years.’ He’s very good coach for decades, which is impressive,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said.

“He’s had an unbelievable career and done so many good things and just so grateful that he’s on the staff. He has the standard of how it’s supposed to look and holds the guys to that standard. He’s not afraid to tell you what he thinks if you don’t meet the standard and praise you if you do meet the standards.”

Fangio has been integral in the defensive rebuild in Philadelphia. He saw enough in free agent Zack Baun to turn him from a special teams player who got limited time on defense as an outside rusher in New Orleans into an All-Pro inside linebacker and finalist for AP Defensive Player of the Year in Philadelphia.

He also helped incorporate two rookie starters in the secondary in Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, which played a big part in the turnaround.

“He’s like a father figure,” Mitchell said. “He’s going to hold you accountable. He’s serious. But he’s got jokes too. He’s funny as well.”

But Fangio will face his toughest test on Sunday when the Eagles face Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

While much has been made out of Fangio’s 0-8 record against Mahomes as a head coach in Denver and a play-caller in Miami, he never had a defense as talented as this one when he faced him.

The record diminishes what Fangio did on defense as his teams scored just 11.9 points per game in those games. Fangio’s defenses allowed only 21.6 points per game to the Kansas City offense – the Chiefs got six additional TDs on defense and special teams – and Mahomes threw only 10 TD passes in the eight games and had a lower passer rating (95.9) and yards per attempt (7.3) than his career average.

“Every time I’ve played Coach Fangio, there’s been different changeups and different things he’s thrown at us,” Mahomes said. “That’s what makes him so great. He won’t do what he did the last time.”

Mahomes called games against Fangio a “chess match” and Fangio stressed the importance of changing up schemes because of Mahomes’ “elite” ability to understand what a defense is doing both before the snap and after.

“There is no secret. This is his seventh year as a starter. No one has gotten the formula to beat him,” Fangio said. “He’s won the chess match against me, the final score. We’ll see if there’s something we can come up with.”

​ Orange County Register 

USC coach Lincoln Riley, GM Chad Bowden tout ‘bright’ future with strong staff additions

• February 6, 2025

LOS ANGELES — Perhaps Lincoln Riley’s brisket, back on that one Easter in 2021, was in fact overcooked. Three years later, the world still doubts his ability to man a grill, since the then-Oklahoma head coach posted an innocent picture on Twitter that’s been maligned ever since.

The world, however, has not seen Riley’s ability to sizzle a Balsamic steak. Chad Bowden has.

“Our relationship’s been great,” Bowden said, USC’s new general manager speaking to reporters for the first time on Wednesday. “Again – anytime you have Balsamic steaks that are phenomenal, you know what I mean … you have a pretty good relationship.”

When Bowden left Indiana for Los Angeles, after his hire away from Notre Dame two weeks ago, he did not find a hotel. He did not find an Airbnb. He has been staying in Riley’s guesthouse – his casita, as Bowden put it – at the USC head coach’s home in Palos Verdes Estates. For a week and a half, the two most important men in USC’s future have bonded over family, and shared visions of grandeur to come. And shared steak.

“A lot of things that he talked about with me as to why he chose to come with USC, they aligned with how I felt,” Bowden said. “And all we want to do is win this thing. We want to win that moment, and we know what moment that is. And we talked about how we’re going to do it.”

That moment, simply, is a national championship. It was a dream Riley pointed to, three years ago, standing atop the Coliseum in his introduction to USC. It’s a dream that’s been clouded, for three years, by steadily declining on-paper results. It’s a dream, now, that looks more real for USC than at any point since the fall of 2023.

For years, USC needed to rebuild its defense; Riley and company overhauled their staff, and re-signed DC whiz D’Anton Lynn to a contract extension, and somehow plucked Rob Ryan from the NFL ranks as USC’s linebackers coach. USC has plainly needed to regain momentum in local recruiting; Riley hired Chad Savage on the offensive staff, an ace Southern California recruiter at Colorado State. USC has known, too, it needed to restructure its front office; in came Bowden and a slew of personnel hires this offseason, part of a modernized front-office approach.

“I think it shows that we’re not content with any part of this program being average, or even being good,” Riley said Wednesday. “Like, that’s not our mentality. Like, any part of this program we’re evaluating on – is it at a national championship level? If it’s not, is it trending that way quickly?”

“And if it’s not, we need to fix it.”

His praise of his newest GM on Wednesday, in what Riley deemed a “partnership,” showed a notable willingness to delegate in the process of fixing it. He and Athletic Director Jen Cohen hired Bowden away from a College Football Playoff finalist in Notre Dame, Bowden telling reporters that USC simply “meant more to me.” And Bowden pitched him during their initial conversation, Riley reflected, on simplifying his role – handling the day-to-day intricacies of roster construction and recruiting, allowing USC’s head coach and staff to focus simply on coaching.

And Bowden steps in at USC at a pivotal moment for college football, with the dawn of athletic department revenue sharing and the sport’s increasing shift to a professional model. On Wednesday, Riley said the USC administration had set some “very aggressive goals” in NIL fundraising, and Cohen has said that the university will invest the full permissible $20.5 million in revenue sharing with athletes come 2025-26, while maximizing investment in football.

When asked Wednesday if he felt he would have the resources he wants to build a roster at USC, Bowden leaned into a microphone with a slight grin.

“Yes,” he answered, matter-of-fact.

Those specific resources are still somewhat up in the air, as the Department of Education might rule that revenue sharing payments must be divided equally between male and female athletes under Title IX. If President Donald Trump’s administration is successful in slashing the Department of Education, though, USC will likely be free to distribute that $20.5 million as it sees fit – as ESPN reported many schools are preparing to follow a model that would dole out around 75% of revenue sharing payments to football players.

Assuming USC would follow a similar model (roughly $15 million to football through revenue sharing), and factoring in previous Southern California News Group reporting that NIL collective House of Victory’s budget has grown upward of $12 million, Bowden and USC’s front office would likely have at least $25 million at their disposal for the 2025-26 season.

Regardless of their roster cap specifics, Bowden and Riley were aligned in their messaging on Wednesday: USC had built a staff and a front office as strong as any program in the country, both asserted.

“We got really good frickin’ players … the future for USC is so incredibly bright,” Bowden said.

“We’re going to make sure,” he continued, “this place reaches its full potential.”

​ Orange County Register 

Bar Chelou in Pasadena has announced its closure after two years

• February 6, 2025

After two years of service, Pasadena’s beloved award-winning restaurant Bar Chelou, will close its doors on Sunday, Feb. 16.

“We are saddened to have to share some news with you,” said a post on the restaurant’s Instagram page. “After careful consideration, we have decided not to extend our lease, which is set to expire at the end of the month. The timing presented us with an opportunity to reconsider our path forward following the Eaton fire just a few miles from us in Altadena. Thus we have made the heart-wrenching decision to close our doors in Pasadena.”

“We are immensely grateful to our customers for their support over the past two years,” the post continued. “Stay tuned to our Insta for more exciting updates on Bar Chelou’s new permanent home later this year.”

Bar Chelou, located in Old Town Pasadena, is spearheaded by chef Doug Rankin who was mentored by chef Ludo Lefebvre. The restaurant opened in January 2023 and quickly found praise from the likes of the New York Times and other publications as one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles.

The menu at Bar Chelou featured dishes such as Clam Toast, Ibérico Pork Chop, Rainbow Trout, Pan de cristal and Lamb Legs. Patrons who frequented the restaurant said it was great for casual meetups and date nights and accessible for those interested in elevated dining. Some on Yelp likened the menu to New York City’s dining scene.

Pasadena residents and foodies from beyond fell in love with the mix of Spanish, Asian and French flavors offered at Bar Chelou. Some of the customer base were also devoted followers of Rankin. His previous Bar and Restaurant in Silver Lake had a similar concept but closed during the coronavirus pandemic, but he brought over some of his team when he opened Bar Chelou.

SEE ALSO: This modern bistro, next to the Pasadena Playhouse, is a culinary star

In an article with Eater, Rankin said that the restaurant’s business slowed in Pasadena after the Eaton Fire. Although the eatery and bar closed only for a couple of days after the devastating wildfires, he noticed the restaurant’s traffic was down, and because his lease was expiring this month, he decided to close the eatery.

Several patrons took to social media to voice their sorrow at hearing the news about the closure.

“This makes me so sad. I loved having such an amazing place around the corner,” an Instagram user replied to the post about the closure.

“Went there for the first time on Monday night and had the trout; it was outstanding. I’ve been thinking about the banana bar desert for the past couple of days, too. Such a bummer,” a Reddit user posted on r/FoodLos Angeles.

Rankin told Eater that he plans to move the restaurant to Denver, Co., but he isn’t opposed to returning to Los Angeles in the future.

​ Orange County Register 

USC names interim president, forms search committee for next campus leader

• February 6, 2025

The USC Board of Trustees has appointed Beong-Soo Kim, the university’s senior vice president and general counsel, to serve as the campus’ interim president following the departure of Carol Folt, it was announced today.

“During his time at USC, Beong has consistently shown his commitment to members of the Trojan Family,” USC Board of Trustees Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson and Vice Chair David C. Bohnett wrote in a message to the university community. “He has built strong relationships with deans, faculty and staff across USC and Keck Medicine, earning respect from everyone. He will work closely with our superb roster of academic leaders, including our provost, senior vice president for health affairs and academic deans, who will continue to sustain and elevate our academic, research and clinical excellence.”

Folt, who has led the university for about five years, announced in November that she will retire from the position at the end of the academic year on June 30.

Despite being named interim president, Kim will not be a candidate to become the university’s next full-time president, according to the university.

USC on Wednesday also announced the creation of a Presidential Search Committee, which will be co-chaired by Board of Trustees members and alumni Carmen Nava and Mark Stevens.

“In addition to their deep roots and commitment to USC, Carmen and Mark are established leaders in business and in the community, and their wisdom and judgment — along with their strong belief in the benefits of collaboration — will be tremendous resources throughout the search and recruitment process,” Nora Johnson and Bohnett wrote in their campus message.

The search committee will also include a “wide range of faculty, staff, student and alumni perspectives from across the Trojan Family.”

“As part of its advisory role, the committee will consolidate feedback from our community to define the characteristics we are seeking in our next president, and ultimately recommend a small number of highly qualified candidates to the Board of Trustees for interview and selection. They will work closely with Russell Reynolds Associates, one of the nation’s top leadership advisory and executive search firms, which has been retained to assist the committee in its search and recruitment efforts.”

The university created a website to provide updates on the search process at https://presidentialsearch.usc.edu.

​ Orange County Register 

Google scraps its diversity hiring goals as it complies with Trump’s new government contractor rules

• February 6, 2025

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is scrapping some of its diversity hiring targets, joining a lengthening list of U.S. companies that have abandoned or scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The move, which was outlined in an email sent to Google employees on Wednesday, came in the wake of an executive order issued by President Donald Trump that was aimed in part at pressuring government contractors to scrap their DEI initiatives.

Like several other major tech companies, Google sells some of its technology and services to the federal government, including its rapidly growing cloud division that’s a key piece of its push into artificial technology.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also signaled the shift in its annual 10-K report it filed this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, Google removed a line included in previous annual reports saying that it’s “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.”

Google generates most of Alphabet’s annual revenue of $350 billion and accounts for almost all of its worldwide workforce of 183,000.

“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there,” Google said in a statement to The Associated Press. “We’ve updated our 10-K language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

The change in language also comes slightly more than two weeks after Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other prominent technology executives — including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg — stood behind Trump during his inauguration.

Meta jettisoned its DEI program last month, shortly before the inauguration, while Amazon halted some of its DEI programs in December following Trump’s election.

Many companies outside of the technology industry also have backed away from DEI. Those include Walt Disney Co., McDonald’s, Ford, Walmart, Target, Lowe’s and John Deere.

Trump’s recent executive order threatens to impose financial sanctions on federal contractors deemed to have “illegal” DEI programs. If the companies are found to be in violation, they could be subject to massive damages under the 1863 False Claims Act. That law states that contractors that make false claims to the government could be liable for three times the government’s damages.

The order also directed all federal agencies to choose the targets of up to nine investigations of publicly traded companies, large non-profits and other institutions with DEI policies that constitute “Illegal discrimination or preference.”

The challenge for companies is knowing which DEI policies the Trump administration may decide are “illegal.” Trump’s executive order seeks to “terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs” and other activities of the federal government, and to compel federal agencies “to , combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”

In both the public and private sector, diversity initiatives have covered a range of practices, from anti-discrimination training and conducting pay equity studies to making efforts to recruit more members of minority groups and women as employees.

Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, has tried to hire more people from underrepresented groups for more than a decade but stepped up those efforts in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered an outcry for more social justice.

Shortly after Floyd died, Pichai set a goal to increase the representation of underrepresented groups in the Mountain View, California, company’s largely Asian and white leadership ranks by 30% by 2025. Google has made some headway since then, but the makeup of its leadership has not changed dramatically.

The representation of Black people in the company’s leadership ranks rose from 2.6% in 2020 to 5.1% last year, according to Google’s annual diversity report. For Hispanic people, the change was 3.7% to 4.3%. The share of women in leadership roles, meanwhile, increased from 26.7% in 2020 to 32.8% in 2024, according to the company’s report.

The numbers aren’t much different in Google’s overall workforce, with Black employees comprising just 5.7% and Latino employees 7.5%. Two-thirds of Google’s worldwide workforce is made up of men, according to the diversity report.

Associated Press business reporter Alexandra Olson contributed to this report.

​ Orange County Register 

Second type of bird flu detected in US dairy cows

• February 6, 2025

By JONEL ALECCIA, AP Health Writer

Dairy cattle in Nevada have been infected with a new type of bird flu that’s different from the version that has spread in U.S. herds since last year, Agriculture Department officials said Wednesday.

The detection indicates that distinct forms of the virus known as Type A H5N1 have spilled over from wild birds into cattle at least twice. Experts said it raises new questions about wider spread and the difficulty of controlling infections in animals and the people who work closely with them.

“I always thought one bird-to-cow transmission was a very rare event. Seems that may not be the case,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

A version of the H5N1 bird flu virus known as B3.13 was confirmed in March after being introduced to cattle in late 2023, scientists said. It has infected more than 950 herds in 16 states. The new version, known as D1.1, was confirmed in Nevada cattle on Friday, according to USDA. It was detected in milk collected as part of a surveillance program launched in December.

“Now we know why it’s really important to test and continue testing,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who helped identify the first spillover.

The D1.1 version of the virus was the type linked to the first U.S. death tied to bird flu and a severe illness in Canada. A person in Louisiana died in January after developing severe respiratory symptoms following contact with wild and backyard birds. In British Columbia, a teen girl was hospitalized for months with a virus traced to poultry.

At least 67 people in the U.S. have been infected with bird flu, mostly those who work closely with dairy or cattle, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

USDA officials said they would post genetic sequences and other information about the new form of the virus to a public repository later this week. Scientists said that would be key to understanding whether the spillover was a recent event or whether the virus has been circulating, perhaps widely, for longer.

“If this turns out to have been something that crossed into cattle a couple months ago, a couple months is a long time not to detect it,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who has studied the H5N1 virus in cattle.

He added that it’s important for federal officials to share promptly information about a virus that has the potential to trigger a pandemic that could “make COVID seem like a walk in the park.”

“It’s a vital part of national security, global security, the well-being of people, of animals and of businesses in the U.S.,” Worobey added.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

​ Orange County Register 

Howard Jones and ABC’s Martin Fry embrace a new generation of fans since ’80s heyday

• February 6, 2025

Howard Jones and Martin Fry of ABC first found stardom in the early ’80s as the United Kingdom’s new wave and synthpop scenes overtook the United States like a second British Invasion.

Like many of their peers, their careers shot to the top of the charts only to experience lulls when their music fell from favor.

But now, they’ve come back into fashion with multi-generational audiences at festivals, such as Cruel World in Pasadena, which ABC played in 2023 and their own coheadlining tour that brings Jones and Fry to the House of Blues in Anaheim on Friday, Feb. 8.

There, you’ll see not only fans who’ve still got their original vinyl and tour T-shirts, but younger fans, too, many of whom weren’t born until years after ’80s hits such as Jones’ “What Is Love?” and “Things Can Only Get Better” or ABC’s “Poison Arrow” and “The Look of Love.”

“I always celebrate silently when I see a young person in the audience or groups of young people,” Jones says recently on video call from his home in Somerset, England. “Gen Z, particularly, we’re starting to get them coming now, and that’s just really, really exciting.

“It feels to me like, ‘Oh yeah, well for them, they’re hearing this music for the first time,’” he says. “It’s brand new. It’s like, Wow, how exciting is that? It’s so great.”

Fry, who played to a large crowd at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena in 2023, said he’s noticed the same trend.

“There’s a new generation of younger people coming through in their 30s and 20s who have researched the whole ’80s era,” Fry says from a vacation home in Barbados. “Synth freaks, people that love the fashion, the clothes, the MTV visuals, the sounds.

“The audacity and blatant entertainment of the 1980s comes through,” he says. “It was a very experimental period in music, and visually, and in the clubs. So it is wonderful to be an elder statesmen of pop now along with Simon Le Bon, Bernard from New Order, and Robert Smith.

“It feels good to be in that exalted company and, joking aside, it feels great to be out on the road playing shows where the audience is into what you’re doing.”

In separate interviews edited for length and clarity and presented here together, Jones and Fry talked about their early days in music, what it felt like when their debut albums became hits, their mutual love for Motown stars such as Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, and more.

Q: Tell me what it’s like touring today whether in theaters and clubs or some of the larger festivals out there.

Howard Jones: It is a wonderful thing to be able to do, to be honest. I feel very honored and privileged to be 40 years later able to go and people want to come and see me and hear the songs and be part of their lives. Those songs have become part of the culture and we have a bond together.

It’s one of those rare occasions now in our society where people can come together and focus on one thing. Sing together and celebrate together with the music they may have grown up with or have discovered since.

Martin Fry: The great thing about festivals like Cruel World and many of the other festivals we play in Europe is you’re playing sometimes to 10,000 or 20,000 people. There’s a lot of floating voters out there you have to persuade. You have to win some of the crowd over. Your fans are there but also there are many people who are checking you out for the first time.

When we played in recent years, I realized there were people who maybe got married to ABC’s ‘The Look of Love.’ Divorced to ‘Be Near Me.’ Remarried when we did ‘When Smokey Sings.’ You’re the soundtrack to their lives, you know. There are tears and laughter when you play, you know the songs mean so much to the audience.

When I got to Cruel World, I fully understood the audience and it felt great to play with that crowd. There’s a whole new generation of people getting interested in the early new wave. For me, to be hanging with the Human League and Echo and the Bunnymen – Squeeze were there and the Gang of Four guys who I’ve known for years – it was a really fascinating festival to play.

Q: You had success with your debut albums – ABC’s ‘The Lexicon of Love’ in 1982, Jones’ ‘Human’s Lib’ two years later. Tell me what had happened before that moment.

MF: We were really quite ambitious. We had a band called Vice Versa in Sheffield. The Cabaret Voltaire and the early Human League, all these bands in Sheffield were really experimental in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Vice Versa was kind of like a proto-Depeche Mode, sort of a Soft Cell band. We played Leeds Futurama Festival and I think we were about 89th on the bill, and I think Depeche Mode were 90th. We were just starting out.

We recorded analog [after changing the name to ABC] but a lot of what we were doing was digital, with the early sampling machines, Fairlights and stuff. So the sound of the record, ‘The Lexicon of Love,’ sounds quite sort of contemporary in a funny kind of way. It doesn’t sound like it’s 40 years old. And it’s served me well all these years to be able to get on stage and sing ‘Poison Arrow,’ ‘The Look of Love’ and ‘Tears Are Not Enough,’ songs from that record.

HJ: I went out to play as an electronic one-man band with equipment that you could buy in your local music store. I didn’t have fancy computers or bespoke machinery or anything like that. I had drum machines, a few synths, you know, whatever I could afford. I think I was the first person to do that. It was a great sense of pioneering something new.

So three or four nights a week, I was out there in pubs and clubs experimenting with this idea, and working out the songs, and then coming back home and fixing things and improving things, then going out again. I realize now it was a great way to do it. It was the ultimate sort of proving that the music was going to work and that people were going to like it.

Q: I would have been anxious, I think, trying something that complicated and new.

HJ: It was terrifying. [Laughs] It was absolutely terrifying. I mean, what was I thinking of? Because when you’ve got a band, you’ve got people to turn to for moral support on the stage, but when you’re doing it on your own, you carry it all. The good side of that is that it developed my stage personality, in terms of I had to talk to the audience. I had to engage them, because I had to do a lot of tweaking with the instruments and programming.

Q: But you weren’t entirely alone. You often had a mime, Jed Hoile, performing too.

HJ: It was more like performance art, really, we were doing. I really wanted to do something original, and so Jed used to come to the shows. He used to dance in the audience, and I thought this guy is amazing, he really should be up on the stage with me. So we worked together to create all these different characters he would engage with during the show. And we had TV screens running VHS tapes. We had all kinds of costumes that he was in. I would sometimes have costumes, too.

Q: I remember seeing that on MTV, and of course ABC had great videos then, too.

HJ: It was very visual (with Hoile), and it’s funny, it’s interesting because this is just at the time when MTV was exploding, and yet we were well down the line of working visually as well. It wasn’t just about the music, it was what it looked like, and what it looked like when you went to a show. We were very comfortable with that.

MF: The power of MTV meant that the videos we made were shown all across America. With the videos, we were very ambitious. We wanted to kind of do The World of ABC. You know, there’s Lisa Vanderpump [in the ‘Poison Arrow’ and ‘Mantrap’ videos], who went on to become a big star in America. There’s Julien Temple directing ABC videos. We wanted a lot of humor in our videos and they were plainly bonkers, you know, but highly entertaining, just like all the other videos on MTV in that period of time.

They weren’t big budget. It was definitely sort of everybody was wrapped up in the creative spirit and pushed it to the limit. Your friends would make the suits for you. The lighting guy would be somebody’s cousin. It was guerrilla filmmaking, definitely, of the finest order. It wasn’t Hollywood by any stretch.

Q: ABC’s first American tour came before all those videos were all out. What was it like to still be mostly unknowns?

MF: I arrived in Phoenix on a wet Tuesday afternoon, and in my sparkling tuxedo in late ’82, I guess it would be, with the violinists and our new pop vision, I got on stage, and looked out. Like ‘The Blues Brothers,’ it had chicken wire across the front of the stage at the venue for the protection not of the audience – of the artists.

People were like, ‘What the (bleep) is this? Like, ‘Who’s this guy in his sparkling tuxedo?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah, America is very different in musical taste. There was that whole chasm between the guys in the ’70s in leather trousers and the long hair, and all the young bands that wanted to sort of change the whole pop landscape like Duran Duran and ABC and Depeche Mode, the Cure, who are all thankfully still going strong. So we were definitely there in those pioneering days getting stuff thrown at us, but gradually, the power of MTV changed things.

Q: By the mid-’90s, things had tailed off for you and your careers. What was it like to hit a lull for some years?

HJ: I think this happens to every single artist, big and small. There will be a time when you are absolutely in the spotlight. Everyone wants to know you, it’s like you’re the thing. But that will go. It may come back later, but it will go. And it is a pretty tough thing to deal with for anybody. You suddenly think, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’

I’d had a great decade during the ’80s. I had hits. Ten hits in America, 13 hits in the U.K., hits all around the world. And course, that will stop. When the record company didn’t want to renew my contract after five albums and selling like millions and millions of records, it was a shock. I thought, ‘What? They must be crazy!’

But then another door opens, which was the internet came along. I was able to become an independent artist and sort of write my own script. It was a brilliant opportunity to carve out a new way of doing things.

MF: You know, in the late ’90s, I started playing shows and you kind of reached a point where people are going, ‘What are you still doing here?” You know what I mean? Like, ‘You had your hits back in the day, man; what’re you still doing here?’ But then people’s perception of ABC and my contemporaries definitely changed, and people realized there was still some excitement there.

Q: Howard, you played the Grammys with your hero Stevie Wonder, as well as Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby. Martin, your song ‘When Smokey Sings’ let to you meeting Smokey Robinson. Tell me about the excitement of those moments.

HJ: Obviously, I love Stevie Wonder and grew up with his music. But when you’re young you have a bit of youthful arrogance, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to step on that stage with those people. I think both me and Tom Dolby, we had our look, we had our music, we had our, you know, swagger. And that’s what you have to have if you’re going to be on the stage.

So it was a whirlwind. I was just enjoying every minute of it. I got to do something that people would only dream of, which was hang out in Stevie Wonder’s studio and jam with him for an afternoon. It was great.

MF: [‘When Smokey Sings’] came from a really tough period where I was 27 and got diagnosed with cancer. We were going to tour with Tina Turner and then everything stopped. I’d go home at night after hospital treatments and pick out box of 7-inch vinyl and just listen to my favorite tunes. So ‘When Smokey Sings’ is about some of those dark moments but being uplifted by hearing those songs.

We met Smokey Robinson at a TV show and handed him the record. It was great. Said, ‘Here we are, Mr. Robinson; this is about you.’ A couple of months later, Mark White [of ABC] and myself met Smokey Robinson in L.A. and he took us around to the Motown building and gave us this handwritten letter, saying how much he was moved and touched that we’d written the song about him and his contemporaries.

A lot of good things came out of that song from bad things.

​ Orange County Register 

IRS workers involved in 2025 tax season can’t take ‘buyout’ offer until May

• February 5, 2025

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season will not be allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until May 15th, according to a letter sent Wednesday to IRS employees.

The letter says that “critical filing season positions in Taxpayer Services, Information Technology and the Taxpayer Advocate Service are exempt” from the administration’s buyout plan until May 15, 2025.

The news comes after President Donald Trump announced a plan to offer buyouts to federal employees through a “deferred resignation program” to quickly reduce the government workforce. The program deadline is Feb. 6.

The buyouts, sent to roughly 2.3 million workers, are for all full-time federal employees with some exemptions, including military personnel, employees of the U.S. Postal Service and positions related to immigration enforcement. They would get about eight months of salary if they accept.

The federal government employed more than 3 million people as of November, accounting for nearly 1.9% of the nation’s entire civilian workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.

Union leaders that represent workers across the federal government have criticized the proposal. Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has advised all federal workers not to accept the offer, which she says is dubious.

“This is not a good deal for them,” Greenwald told The Associated Press. “If you sign this document and then later change your mind, you are left without any power to fight back.”

She added: “I do not recommend people sign the document. They need to have control of their own career, and this document does not give it to them.”

The NTEU union represents roughly 150,000 employees in 37 departments and agencies.

“This country needs skilled, experienced federal employees. And so we are urging people not to take this deal because it will damage the services to the American people and it will harm the federal employees who have dedicated themselves and their career to serving.”

Jan. 27 is the official start date of the 2025 tax season and the IRS expects more than 140 million tax returns to be filed by the April 15 deadline.

“What most people don’t realize is that 85% of the federal workforce works outside of D.C.,” she said. “They’re your neighbors, your family, your friends. And they deliver key services for the American people.”

​ Orange County Register